“When I was a child, I never once looked up at the stars and dreamt of the word “logistics.” I never once thought to myself, “When I grow up, I want to be really good with a spreadsheet.””
By Dr. John Curington
Here we are, though, having embarked on a week of training young physicians in the beautiful art of gentle, precise surgery, and none of this would be possible without the hard work of an entire team of careful, caring people ordering supplies, double-checking spreadsheets, verifying that everything works. When the trainers go into the procedure room, we are focused on teaching the young doctors how to do a great vasectomy – a combination of being very good with your hands and very kind to the patients. All of this would grind to a halt if we were to reach for a suture and find that that it’s not there, or if we were to ask for an instrument and find that it’s not sterile.
Vasectomy is a hopeful act, a process to help a man and a family pick the number of children that they want and focus on taking care of that number of kids. This man has put his faith in us, in our ability to perform his procedure smoothly, comfortably, and quickly. It’s only by being well prepared that we can live up to his expectations.
In Uganda, we are spending an intense week of working with realistic models, studying the evidence behind each step, and then actually performing real vasectomies on patients. World Vasectomy Day has assembled a team that has already spent months preparing so that I as a trainer can focus on the trainees and the patients. The hard-working team has spent months negotiating clinic spaces, ordering and organizing supplies, and making sure we had support from countless organizations we work with in Uganda, including the Ministry of Health. Not only have they been preparing the clinical aspects, they have been organizing campaigns to educate and inspire men to take advantage of our services. And of course, Jonathan Stack, one of the founders of WVD, is already there in Uganda too. Jonathan had the dream to inspire all of this and the organizational skills to put this all into place.
So, while my childhood self never once dreamt of spreadsheets and checklists and licenses and documents, now my experienced trainer self is so thankful that we have all these tools and the staff to follow through. We teach our trainees the best, most evidence-based techniques so that the patients receive the best vasectomies. The whole team with the checklists, the spreadsheets, and the careful attention to detail makes all this possible.
